Editors' Blog

Law firms 'getting slightly better at treating staff' shock

Posted 2/08/2007 by Alex Novarese

What else is there to say about the much-debated topics of assistant morale, talent wars and work-life balance? Quite a bit if you are prepared to ignore some of the more hyperbolic claims and take a balanced look.

Reading through Legal Week Intelligence’s annual Employee Satisfaction Survey is as good a place as any to start, though the trends it highlights are a little too nuanced and complex for those hunting for shock-horror headlines.

Having canvassed just under 3,000 assistants and senior associates, the 200-page report constitutes arguably the most detailed overview of the attitudes, aspirations and experiences of modern lawyers yet. The report, the third investigation by Legal Week’s dedicated research arm, Legal Week Intelligence, also includes detailed rankings on assistants’ experiences of 54 of the 60 largest law firms currently active in the UK, with each firm achieving an average of more than 50 responses.

Certain themes emerge, many of them continuations of recent trends. Younger lawyers are more money-motivated, better-informed, less loyal and increasingly see law as a stepping stone in their working lives rather than a career for life.

There are also clear indications that diminishing partner prospects have strained the link that once joined the owners of legal businesses to their younger ranks. As such, partnership is no longer so much the overriding goal for all young lawyers, though its drawing power is still considerable.

It is, of course, something of a chicken and egg scenario when you start asking whether this is because staff themselves are less loyal or whether it is firms themselves that have done away with much of their collegiality by structuring their businesses to maximise partner profits.

Whichever way you see it, there is little doubt that the modern partnership track is being viewed as increasingly incompatible with the aspirations of the young female lawyers who already make up the bulk of the UK profession’s junior intake.

Only 36% of female respondents cited partnership at their own firm as their preferred option, compared to 60% of male respondents. Even accounting for the fact that a further 7% see themselves making partner with another firm, only 43% of female juniors are currently aiming for partnership at all.

In such a short-term environment, ‘soft’ factors such as work-life balance, culture and treatment by partners are ranked as the most important factors by assistants. Considering that lawyers think they are unlikely to make partner, salary also unsurprisingly ranks high, cited as the seventh-most important factor out of 37, though it is one of the few ‘hard’ criteria to rank high.

So far, so familiar. But what is more surprising are indications that a good number of law firms are getting their act together. For a start, the general rankings on some of the most important ‘soft’ factors like partner treatment have gone up.

But perhaps more significant for the market is the breakdown of the traditional lifestyle ‘tiers’ within major UK law firms. While once you could have bet that top City firms would universally come out with the worse satisfaction rankings - while scoring top on salary, work and prestige - some of these firms have achieved dramatic improvements in their staff satisfaction ratings.

Likewise, some firms you would typically bracket at the 'lifestyle' end of the market are actually scoring pretty badly. Since this is supposed to be one of their main attractions as employers, this is potentially disastrous for individual firms, should it continue.

Likewise, evidence that some elite London firms are getting their act together in terms of treating their staff better could prove a problem for US law firms in London, since part of their current pitch to recruits is that while you will get monstered, you might as well get paid 50% more for the privilege.

The survey also strongly suggests that US firms still have a problem with perceptions that their London outposts are inherently risky, with nearly one in 10 respondents saying they feel ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ to be laid off, compared with just 1% at UK firms. Still, US firms can at least be credited with importing structured pro bono policies to the UK, an area in which staff ranked them very highly. How much this will be an advantage for firms is hard to say.

UK firms also receive respectable rankings from associates for encouraging pro bono work. There’s one slight problem: assistants as a whole ranked pro bono as their least important factor in defining job satisfaction out of no less than 37 different criteria.

Considering the frequent complaints from assistants of greedy partners and firms, there is perhaps a touch of hypocrisy from generation Y lawyers who turn out to be as money-motivated as the partners they no longer aspire to follow.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com